As usual "what life was like" depends heavily on the group of people you are referring to, but I'll try to give you a general sense of what life was like.

Towards the end of the USSR in 1991, the masses/worker population suffered, partly due to the already stagnating command economy by the time Glasnost and Perestroika were enacted, and partly due to Gorbachev's reforms themselves. "There was lower life expectancy... excessive alcohol consumption... higher infant mortality rates" [Professor Archie Brown]. John Lewis Gaddis commented that the average worker would work from Tuesday to Friday before drinking heavily on the weekends to combat grief and the harsh winters, before resuming work again on Tuesday after a hungover Monday.